


Booker has a rolodex

by linoleum_ice



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Football | Soccer, Gen, Rated T for Trashmouth, and alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26373904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linoleum_ice/pseuds/linoleum_ice
Summary: The first thing he does is get a cable subscription. Netflix makes him want to drink and scheduled programming gives him a reason to get out of bed.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 76





	Booker has a rolodex

**Author's Note:**

> A big thanks to [Terresdebrume](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume) for betaing!

The instant Andy leaves his periphery for the very last time, Booker closes his eyes and imagines a rolodex of every memory he has of her. He pulls out the first card. This beach, this breeze, the glint of the sun in her glistening eyes. He swallows his whiskey down to the patter of their shoes up the stairs from sand to concrete. He doesn’t want to know if Andy looked back.

He unclasps the next memory, the press of her blood on his fingers, her scream, his pleas. The look she gives him. Her glistening eyes. And the next. The smoke, the smell of his own intestines, the game, the guilt. She’s pressing her forehead to his when he comes back to himself. Her glistening eyes. He keeps making her cry.

Past fifty years or so, the paper cards start degrading. The words meld together. The memories meld together. There are some he’s kept in good shape, though the sharp edges have worn down with the times he’s handled it. Handled with care. One of them is autumn in Busan. She takes his face in her tall, cool fingers and presses a kiss to both his cheeks.

When he gets to the end, the sky is pink, and the air’s getting cold. He turns around, takes the stairs back to the bar and gets stupid, _stupid_ drunk.

```

He thinks about going to Quebec at first, peering down his empty bottle of vodka in some dingy East End motel, maybe even Francophone Africa, but ultimately decides against it. He’s not in the mood for adventure. He’s not really in the mood for anything at all and that’s the sort of mood that always brings him back home.

On the train he promises himself, for all his word is worth (though it’s not worth all that much), that he’ll _at least_ stay away from the drugs. He knows a rapid and unrelenting descent into alcoholism is not only inevitable, but just plain necessary and he doesn’t need drugs on top of that. He’s gone around the ringer with drugs and he knows it will always get him into the worst parts of town with the prostitutes and the thieves. Always. At least when he’s socks off drunk, he can still function well enough to put food on the table. 

His safehouse is caked in a thin layer of dust when he gets there at ass AM in the morning. He peels back the curtains and opens the window and gets on the tip of his toes to shimmy out a duvet from some cupboard. He brushes down his mattress and makes the bed. He showers. And then he sleeps.

The dream is bad tonight. With the self-loathing running high, it always is. The red hot flame of fury had long burned off and there’s nothing warming Quynh now. The water is cold, the iron is colder and all she feels is a stinging numbness. Bitter betrayal. Does she find vindication, Booker wonders, that Andy finds betrayal in much the same way she betrays Quynh? No, reasons Booker, she’d be disgusted by him. He wakes up on a pillow damp with involuntary tears.

```

The first thing he does is get a cable subscription. Netflix makes him want to drink and scheduled programming gives him a reason to get out of bed. The next thing he does is write a CV but when he starts thinking whether or not to add fake military experience he thinks about Nile. God. Thinking about that skip in his heart when he first dreamt about her makes him want to die. That terrible, sick thought that maybe she’s come along to be the Joe to his Nicky or the Nicky to his Joe. They didn’t become immortals back to back, but two hundred years isn’t a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, right? They could need each other as much as JoeandNicky did. She could be his someone. Someone other than himself.

But then he met her and that image of her smashed and she couldn’t love him like that and he couldn’t love her like that because it’s not _fucking_ real. It never was. He loves her now, Nile Freeman, as she is. Loves her if only because she’s real. _She’s_ real.

To boil it down, what he’s saying is he didn’t finish his CV.

```

In the past, he’d tried dating twice. The first time lasted a year and a half before that poor woman threw in the towel and stopped putting up with him. To be clear, it wasn’t the drinking, it was an okay few years for him. No, she told him _Sébastien. I love you with every inch of my being but I cannot live as I do while half of your heart belongs to a ghost. For the love of God, get over your dead wife before finding another girl._

His only other girlfriend lasted two weeks. He cut the tip of his finger clean off by accident and it started growing back right in front of her eyes.

Needless to say he’d been well warned off of girlfriends from that point on.

But in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big of a deal. He didn’t have a girlfriend but he had his family. He had Joe to weave around the kitchen with, bickering about sport while preparing dinner. He had Nicky to look over his shoulder while he worked at his laptop, chatting about blockchain and mars rovers. Andy, he—

As he unfurled his rolodex that day, he pulled out a good number of cards he didn’t think he still had. He’ll always remember her like the day she took him down to the Greek countryside, rows of citrus orchards flying past their convertible. She was driving and belting out whatever rock ballad took the radio while he blew cigarette smoke into the wind. She cupped the back of his neck with one hand still on the steering wheel and kissed his forehead.

He won’t have the guys again for another hundred years and he won’t have _her_ again. Ever.

```

The dreams don’t get any better. Sometimes he wakes up screaming.

The neighbours, a batch of twenty-somethings and an elderly couple, give him sympathetic looks. But those, too, eventually wear down to scowls of irritation.

He smells like a drunk.

(He _is_ a drunk.)

His money’s running out.

He wonders, sometimes, who’s dream Quynh tunes into when she closes her eyes. Is she watching Nile take her first steps into the great unknown that is their wondrous planet, or is she cackling at the slapstick comedy that is his life? Either way, he hopes she’s entertained.

```

It all comes to a head on a Friday when he watches PSG play Liverpool, the only thing that makes him feel _anything_ these days. He’s got a plate of store-bought casserole and a small glass of Calvados. It’s happening. It’s going. There’s a penalty kick, there’s a yellow card, there’s a goal. There’s also Jürgen Klopp yelling from the sidelines in his puffy down jacket and he just doesn’t know what it is about Jürgen Klopp yelling from the sidelines in his puffy down jacket but it makes him want to gingerly take the man’s clear-framed glasses off and run a hand through his perpetually messy hair. And that’s about when Booker realises, he’s completely lost it.

(There’s probably a saying out there; daydreaming about fondling Liverpool Football Club’s German manager is a either a sign of psychosis or the big man upstairs telling you to get your shit together.) 

Since he came back to Paris his mind had been a cycle of _it won’t be like this for one hundred years_ _and Future Booker will be fine eventually_ while he reached for another bottle and yearned to feel the touch of another human. But, and he has always known this, it’s entirely up to him to will Future Booker into existence and the best time for that was the bar in England. Fortunately, the second best time is now. 

Although truth is, it’s not as easy as just snapping out of it, Jürgen Klopp be damned, but what he _can_ do is pour the rest of this Calvados down the sink and take a shower. So that’s what he does. He has to puke halfway through, but it’s not all bad because there’s still some casserole to stave off his now empty stomach, which he finishes on the coffee table, along with his long-neglected CV.

There. He did it. He did it eventually. Now to submit it. One step at a time.

```

He’d stopped caring a long time ago whether he had a moral imperative to fight crime. Other than this immortality business there is nothing remarkable about him. No normal person goes around thinking they’ve got to save ten children from the slave trade by ten PM sharp, else they burn in hell for this unforgivable sin. Booker likes to think—scratch that he _does_ think—that he does good by this world not because he has the necessary skill set and thus becomes automatically preordained to, but because he wants to help.

Which is a roundabout way of saying he gets an accounting job at an insurance firm, but also fights cybercrime on the side. Both, he does of his own volition. Not because he’s guilty. He’s not guilty. 

He makes acquaintances at work (some are closer to friends, some are closer to enemies, none quite reach either threshold), and he tries not to go to work drunk. It’s good work, in a way that challenges his brain, but keeps it from wandering off to cold depths and old rolodexes. It doesn’t hold a candle to hunting down the scum of the earth with his people and his old UMG, but it keeps at arms’ length the wish of never having been born. But the thing is, it’s also very repetitive. The clients all have the same problems and he figures out soon enough if he doesn’t get a hobby—and fighting cybercrime is _not_ a hobby—, he’ll lose his mind.

This time around, his saviour comes in the form of Anne-Claire From Legal. She’s firmly in the closer-to-friends camp and chats with him about football over the coffee machine, a gentle reprieve to break up the monotony that he’s always grateful for. _Sébastien,_ she says on a miserable, rainy Tuesday, _do you play?_

He asks what, football?

 _What else,_ she says.

What else indeed. He shrugs and says he used to.

She laughs. She says he sounds very mysterious when he says stuff like that. What stuff she’s referring to, he doesn’t know. But what he _does_ know, is that he’s invited to play with her team in this rec league. A try-out. She promises it’s very professional. It’s on Thursday nights, if the weather’s alright. She squeezes his shoulder before heading to the sink and rinsing out her mug.

Booker is left stunned, like a deer in headlights, illuminated by the oncoming car.

```

He doesn’t dream on Tuesday.

He doesn’t dream on Wednesday.

What’s up with that?

```

Anne-Claire’s captain is a stocky young man who greets him with a firm handshake and a bright smile. His name is Julien and Booker is kind of offended how good he is at football for someone who sits in front of a computer most hours of the day and codes.

He tries out, flexes muscles he hasn’t engaged in a long time and tries not to seem too out of breath. He feels somewhat like a spectator to Julien’s well-oiled machine, his people move from drill to drill like clockwork, but he does his best. Julien seems to think it’s enough. He gives Booker a pat on the back and a fist bump in one fell swoop.

“My niece really wants to go pro”, Julien tells him during a water break. Julien, he finds, could talk for hours.

Booker asks how old she is.

“Seven”, Julien says.

Booker nods, tells Julien he thinks it’s very admirable of her.

Julien smiles even wider. “I love that about them, you know, kids," Julien says. "They do shit just ‘cause they want to. Just say whatever they want. When they do something they think is cool, they always want you to be there, give you a high five. Share the moment or whatever.”Julien knocks his shoulder against Booker’s. “You get me?”

Booker smiles, just a bit.

“Do shit for the sake of doing shit,” says Booker.

“Ex- _act-_ ly” _,_ Julien says, and then they’re being called back to the field.

 _God_ , Booker thinks as he starts up a jog. _He wants kids._

**Author's Note:**

> yell at me on my multifandom [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/linoleum-ice)  
> I can also be found lurking on the [tog discord server](https://discord.gg/6ampwS)


End file.
